By now you may have heard some of the fuss around a commentary published in a scientific journal that allegedly details how Bitcoin is destroying the environment by consuming too much water. The commentary has been picked up and spread around by mainstream media, despite its multiple factual and mathematical inaccuracies.
This may trigger some eye-rolling and “here we go again.” For years, we have had to work hard to debunk the false claims about Bitcoin’s energy consumption, which ranged from unhinged declarations that Bitcoin mining would use up all the energy in the world, to more understandable, albeit, lazy confusion about what a Bitcoin transaction even is. We more or less won that – few regulators these days insist Bitcoin mining should be banned because of its environmental impact, instead pivoting to cite its illicit use as the main reason for outright rejection.
Noelle Acheson is the former head of research at CoinDesk and Genesis Trading, and host of the CoinDesk Markets Daily podcast. This article is excerpted from her Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter, which focuses on the overlap between the shifting crypto and macro landscapes. These opinions are hers, and nothing she writes should be taken as investment advice.
It’s almost as if mainstream media has been searching for another platform from which to justify its judgemental condescension. To this eager audience, data scientist Alex de Vries, founder of Digiconomist, delivered a commentary titled: “Bitcoin’s growing water footprint.”
No conspiracy theories here
It’s a clever idea, if your aim is to reverse the growing global acceptance that Bitcoin mining can be a positive environmental force.
Climate fear mongering has been a tool-of-the-trade for some time in the clicks industry, and it is timely given the ongoing COP28 summit. Combine some existential doom with a scary new financial system that no-one can seemingly control, and the mainstream press will of course lap it up.
What’s more, the new focus is particularly topical – water issues are now a regular feature in my daily reads. This weekend, for instance, economist Mariana Mazzucato and others published a piece in Project Syndicate called “Water and the High Price of Bad Economics.” On Friday, the UN published its Global Drought Snapshot with…
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